Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Read online

  And Gandhi’s ‘non-violent liquidation’ of Bose achieved its goal, if not with party members who voted for him, but with party bureaucrats over whom party delegates had no control.

  This made Bose worried about the fate of a complete independence, as well as the issues, such as the Partition, that the Muslim League, under Jinnah, was demanding.

  The issues were stirring up more suspicion as Congress’ stand wasn’t firm and often vague.

  N G Jog, one of Bose’s early biographers believed that during the Tripuri case Bose landed in a deeper crisis because Gandhi remote-controlled his men from Rajkot to sabotage him. Gandhi remained in Rajkot on a much lesser issue which ‘started with a fast and ended with a fiasco’, by the time Bose resigned from his presidency in 1939, wrote Jog in his book, In Freedom’s Quest.

  ‘But people wondered, if Gandhi’s failure in Rajkot was less uncomplimentary than his victory over Bose,’ quipped Jog, who quoted from the Free Press Journal editorial which said: ‘Gandhi’s aim was to politically assassinate Bose’.

  And once he was out, Bose became more active in sending feelers to the Axis leaders.

  As for example, once during 1938, Bose met the German Consul in Bombay to discuss the issue of India’s independence.

  British intelligence intercepted this while the Consul General was sending a telegram regarding the gist of his discussion he had had with Bose, and they gave it out to Gandhi, which influenced Gandhi’s decision to not give Bose a second chance.

  However, Gandhi did not seek any clarification from Bose for his reportedly ‘clandestine’ meeting with the German Consul General. ‘It should be treated as a thriller,’ wrote Jog, but in the light of new facts coming out since Jog wrote his biography, the meeting may not be totally unlikely of Bose.

  First, his foreign policy was openly pronounced, seeking help from globally anti-British forces, and secondly, as President of Congress, he was free to meet the German Consul General without having to explain it to either the British government or to Gandhi.

  Now, once forced out of the Congress, he was simultaneously discussing his bigger plans with Ajoy Ghosh (who later became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India) for exploring possibilities with leaders in Moscow. Incidentally, Ghosh was one of the top CPI leaders, who knew too well that Bose was in Russia after the war was over.

  After giving it a lot of thought, Kremlin agreed to give Bose a transit visa via Moscow, to allow him to go to Germany from Afghanistan. However, Moscow, under Stalin, did not want to risk Great Britain’s wrath, though they signed a non-aggression pact with Berlin which was one of the major reasons that goaded Europe into the Second World War.

  A look into some of the documents exchanged by Russians in Kabul, and Germans via their respective resident offices, reveal that Moscow did not immediately agree with the request that the German foreign office had made instead, they dragged their feet.

  This was despite senior Indian Communist Party leaders having tried their best to persuade Kremlin.

  Bose’s writings on Communism in his book The Indian Struggle had sounded an alert to Moscow. ‘With regard to Bose, the Cadres’ section has no supplementary material. After he escaped from house arrest and left India, he has spoken nowhere publicly. And hence, neither his location nor his attitudes on important issues of the contemporary international war situation is known,’ wrote the Russian Head of Cadres’ Section/Guiyaev and Senior Resident/Kozlov in Kabul to Drimitov in Moscow.

  Interestingly, earlier in their report they had virtually written-off Bhagat Ram who accompanied Bose till Kabul. Indo-Russian Relations part II by Roy Dutta Gupta, Vasudevan, Asiatic Society, 2000, pp 305 – 306.

  And until the German Consular Head of Chancellery, Schmidt, prevailed upon his Russian counterpart, Bose’s visa was delayed.

  Apparently, while weighing options earlier, Bose dismissed possibilities of his escape to Japan from Calcutta as the route was infested with British intelligence agencies, Dr Purabi Roy told this writer, though she felt that, ‘Bose was somewhat misled over his route which became too long and time-consuming for him with Russians dragging their feet, which wasted his precious time.’ This fairly explains Kremlin’s rather mischievous hesitation with Bose.

  At the point of time when every day was important, both Moscow and their men in Kabul pretended as if they knew nothing about Bose’s political credentials, though German officials knew them too well.

  It was different though that they could not use Bose like they thought they would, once Bose was in Berlin.

  To everyone in the Axis bloc, his message was simple, clear, and bold: ‘If you help us against the British, you help yourself... India freed, means humanity freed.’

  Now, coming to the Indian scene that was played out before Bose’s escape, and Gandhi’s mechanism after he became the Congress President for a second time despite Gandhi’s wish, within three months after being forced out of Congress with a ‘bell, book and candle’ from all elective bodies, Bose invited not only the Congress’ wrath but, more intensely, the wrath of the British government for launching a new radical party called the Forward Bloc, as well as a weekly by same name which the Government banned within a few months of its launch.

  It might sound strange that most of the Left parties, including the Congress Socialist Party and even the Communists-Left-Forward-Bloc-sponsored Left Consolidation Committee, for ‘tactical reasons… somehow feared (that the) Forward Bloc might not remain with Congress for long’. However, a parting of ways created much bitterness (which everyone contributed to, including Gandhi), even though it did not surprise pro-Congress and unbiased historians.

  For Bose, Gandhi wasn’t the saint, like all assumed.

  While historians and some of Bose’s biographers believe, after his resignation, he had become more popular nationally but his party was a failure. Everywhere he travelled, Bose always had huge masses gathered to listen to him as he explained about the opportunity that a war in Europe had thrown up for India as well as telling them about the Forward Bloc’s programmes, but his ‘party wasn’t a great success!’

  The massive number of people gathered in one of his meetings in Gujarat amazed his local supporters who feared Bose’s censuring Gandhi might be his undoing as far as people’s response was concerned.

  As Bose got a little irritated with his local supporters’ vacillation over the success of the meeting, he told them ‘So what? If people don’t turn up, should I go to Himalaya for penance?’

  A similar incident happened when Bose was scheduled to speak to the people of Bombay, along with CPI leader Shreepad Amrit Dange.

  It was raining, and Dange thought the meeting would flop, but he told Dange that if a single person turns up, ‘I will speak to him’. And ‘to my surprise, the huge space got filled up by men with umbrellas. As far as I could see, I could only see umbrellas,’ wrote Dange in a piece that came out in a Bengali magazine long after Dange had died.

  They often forget, like Gandhi’s American biographer, that from launching his party to the date of his escape, it wasn’t a very long time for Bose to transport his great personal success to his new party. As far as, his personal success was concerned, even Gandhi admitted it in Harijan.

  Thus, under these circumstances, Bose not only left his motherland, but pushed his career into a great uncertainty and peril which none of his Congress peers would have dared to take for the sake of the nation’s independence. And Bose paid for this through his dignified Russian captivity.

  Interestingly, when Bose was ill after being released from the jail in Calcutta after he told the British government, ‘Give me freedom or give me death’, his protest, in the form of a fast unto death, began.

  Bose was released and interned again in his Calcutta home, but by then he had cast his die for an escape. Gandhi sent his emissary to persuade him to make public apologies for his ‘various omissions and commissions’ against the Congress (read Gandhi), and assured him that disci
plinary actions against him would be withdrawn Bose’s answer was typical to his being: ‘I read during my school days a poem by William Tell. It read “I kneel, I kneel to God and God alone, my body is in Austrian hand, but conscience is my own”.’

  He thus sealed all ways of rapprochement or reconciliations with Gandhi, and instead explored his contacts among the Axis.

  Interned in Russia, Bose, after the war, might have enjoyed (helplessly though, if he had the opportunity to know) the fear his presence in Russia generated among the leaders in New Delhi, Washington or London, but William Tell’s poem may have consoled him in Moscow.

  However, Bose’s fear that Congress under Gandhi wouldn’t take a strong stand during the war, wasn’t totally unfounded, as Gandhi’s American biographer Arthur Herman wrote (in Churchill and Gandhi): ‘When Gandhi met Lord Linlithgow to discuss about war issues vis-à-vis Congress cooperation, tears rolled out of Gandhi’s eyes as he could visualise Westminster Abbey getting crushed to dust in German bombing.’

  ‘Tears rolled out as Gandhi remembered his early days in England’ and saw the enlightened faces of Britishers (a phenomenon absent in India) and the process of his getting gradually wedded to Victorian values began.

  Bose knew better how impossible it was to fight these British influences on Congress leaders who actually never suffered under British rule but all the British activities added to their glory.

  Even Michael Edwardes tends to agree with this inference in his book Last Years of British India.

  CPI leader K Ponda told me, ‘At this juncture, Bose realised he would either be kept in prison throughout the war by the British on concocted charges, or suffer a slow and painful petering out in prison.’

  Here, let us not forget that CPI was very close to the Communist Party of Great Britain and their leaders used to get several secret information from the British Communist Party. The British war plan on Bose wasn’t difficult to get from them, but of course, CPI strangely, though successfully, did not share Bose’s escape secrets with them after Moscow’s non-aggression treaty with Berlin. ‘Russia wasn’t in good terms with UK, and CPI kept Bose’s plans a guarded secret!

  Our leaders felt his going to Russia was final, and that is from where he would operate during the war,’ said Ponda. ‘Later, Russian hesitation and rejection was unexpected,’ he added.

  For didn’t British administration almost kill him in the Mandalay jail in Burma or in the Jabalpur Central Jail in Madhya Pradesh before he was exiled to Europe?

  It would have been an inglorious end for Bose, for the British would not have allowed him to roam as a free man when they were either fighting the Axis in Europe or the Japanese in South East Asia, or when they would be planning to leave India divided.

  So what next? Bose, after all, was not prepared to enjoy a ‘glorious retreat,’ like Churchill termed the Nazi army’s gracefully allowing about 30,000 defeated British army men to retreat safely from Dunkirk.

  For Bose knew that the Britishers hadn’t changed the views that they had had about him when he force-landed in India in 1937 after a four-year-exile in Europe and got arrested again.

  The State Home Secretary, Hallet, then defending Bose’s detention (after his return in 1937), observed: ‘After Mr Bose’s arrest in 1924, his record was examined with great care by two judges who held that there was reasonable ground for the belief that Bose was a member of a revolutionary conspiracy, and if allowed freedom, he could be danger to the state... particularly because of his public position and outstanding organising capacity’. Bose was possibly in touch with terrorist parties and was cognisant of its plots for assassination of government servants. He preached the message of communism (a false allegation) and urged a parallel government at Lahore Congress. He was head of Jugantar Party (which was) responsible for (the) Chittagong armoury raid, the Pahaali outrage and other crimes.’

  This wasn’t all! Home Member Sir Henry Craik from the Government buttressed these doubts: ‘The Samyavadi Sanga movement, founded by Bose in 1932, later on converted its name into the Hindustan Republican Army… A pamphlet in Bose’s own hand intercepted from Vienna, regretted that no attempts were made to win over Indian Army and the police and noted that the national movement would succeed only if revenue collection was prevented.’

  Sir Henry warned the Government: ‘This man had a definite terrorist connection, and had, to best of our belief, a definite idea of violent revolution. The Government of India would be acting in criminal folly if they allowed a man of Bose’s intellect and organising capacity to have liberty to put these ideas into executions.’

  Bose knew that in the British mind, these impressions were as fresh as they were during the late 1930s and that Gandhi may have also believed them by now as his attacks on Bose became bitter, though Gandhi never attributed or echoed the British charges, but once again in jail, Bose knew his protest would be of no use, as a determined British ‘during war might poison him to a gradual death (an input from CPI leader whom I quoted earlier).’

  It is important to recall here that they wanted to get rid of him. The moment the British government came to know that Bose was in Kabul and waiting for a vacillating Kremlin’s giving him a transit visa, the ‘Teheran- and Cairo-based British spies were licensed to kill Bose’ (though it was a different story that they could not, but such orders were issued from MI 16, under Prime-Ministerial directive!).

  Thus, an escape to endeavour a better experiment to free India from the British would be a goal worth trying, and Bose’s feelers began getting an Axis response despite so tight a security.

  Yet, once Bose escaped, and after it was known that he gave British CIDs a slip, Gandhi admired his resourcefulness, and (according to Abul Kalam Azad, a Gandhian, in his book India Wins Freedom) this began to cloud Gandhi’s decisions from an outright rejection of the Cripps Mission to launching the Quit India Movement.

  But as paradox would have it, by the time Bose could thaw Gandhi’s resistance and draw him close to his strategic point, he was in the thick of the war zone and sending his messages to the British, Indians, and Gandhi as well.

  For once the Cripps mission was rejected, Bose thanked Gandhi though ‘a democrat and a communist, Nehru’ did not quite like the ‘way Gandhi was undergoing a metamorphosis’. He was one of those Gandhi’s disciples who tried to dissuade his ‘master’ not to ask the British to quit during the war.

  Amid opposition from his loyal men, for a moment Gandhi felt lonely but that did not prevent him from asking the British to quit. Gandhi and Bose by Sailesh Dey (in Bengali).

  ‘We have no quarrels with Japan. Once you leave India, we will negotiate peace with them,’ Gandhi told the British as he was becoming unsure of the Allies’ victory and uncertain about Japan’s intensified aggression in 1942.

  One year later, after taking over the leadership of the Indian Legion from another great and legendary revolutionary Rash Behari Bose, Bose explained to Gandhi in a broadcast as to why he chose this hazardous venture and refused to accept both the Congress and British government’s offer of the shameful Churchillian thesis of ‘glorious retreat’.

  Though he laid bare his heart to tell Gandhi what his escape was all about, he did not explain the danger he faced from the British in India.

  Instead, he explained the reasons why he embraced the hazard and a ‘personal peril by escaping India, thus pushing his fate to an uncertainty’ for the sake of freedom, though he did not elaborate how he prepared the ground for his great escape via Gaya in Bihar, and Afghanistan.

  Paying tribute to Gandhi for launching the Quit India Movement, Bose said, ‘The high regard in which you are held by patriotic Indians outside India, and by foreign sympathisers of India’s freedom movement, was increased a hundred fold when you bravely sponsored the Quit India resolution in August 1942.’

  He then explained to Gandhi why he was impelled to leave India: ‘I can assure, Mahatma, that before I finally decided to set out on a hazardous mission, I spent
days, weeks, and months in carefully considering the pros and cons of the case. After having served my people so long to the best of my ability, I could have no desire to be a traitor, or to give anyone a justification to call me a traitor. It was easiest for me to remain at home and go on working as I had worked for so long. It was also an easy thing for me to remain in an Indian prison, while the war lasted. Personally, I had nothing to lose by doing so. Thanks to the generosity and affection of my countrymen I had obtained the highest honour which it was possible for any public worker in India to achieve. I had also built a party of staunch and loyal colleagues who had implicit faith in me. By going abroad on a perilous quest I was risking not only my life and career and my whole future career, but what was more, the future of my party. If I had the slightest hope that without action from abroad we could win freedom, I would have never have left India during a crisis. If I had any hope that within this lifetime we could get another chance – another golden opportunity – for winning freedom, as during the present war, I doubt I would have left home. But I was convinced of two things: first, that such a golden opportunity would not come within another century, and, second, that without action from abroad, we would not be able to win freedom merely through our own efforts at home. That is why I resolved to take a plunge.’

  Then Bose also explained that neither he nor his colleagues in Germany and Japan entertained any hopes of any rewards: ‘only awards we expect for our suffering and sacrifice would be freedom of our country.’

  ‘It was unlikely that Gandhi could listen to this broadcast,’ commented a writer, but still, Gandhi had a thousand ears.

  His loyalists, who hadn’t till then shifted their loyalty to the chieftains of the destroyed but victorious British government for getting their ‘awards’ for doing Tammany Hall intrigues in the name of freedom fighting, may have conveyed Bose’s message to Gandhi.

  Even the British government’s ignored Bose’s broadcasts and activities at its own peril (though their Intelligence tried their best to track down Bose for a secret assassination attempt, in defence of the Empire), inspired a British labour daily to comment on the British attitude of ignoring the Bose phenomenon during the war: ‘it isn’t opportunity knocking at the door, but history is battering it down.’ Last years of British India.